Saturday, November 17, 2012

This week's edition of Saturday Sharing puts a foot in the past, exploring Wonders & Marvels, the custom hand-made, David Foster Wallace's archives, Einstein's brain, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things, and one of the last remaining typewriter-repair shops.

✦ If you yearn for something hand- or custom-made, Makeably is for you. Started by two friends who'd met at Penn, Makeably describes itself as "a marketplace for custom-made creative items for your everyday living, made uniquely for you." A similar site is the four-step Custom Made. (My thanks to Curator magazine for the links.)

✦ The archive of the late novelist David Foster Wallace resides at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. This past September the Ransom Center opened archival materials relating to the posthumous novel The Pale King to researchers. A preview is available online.

✦ Those of us of a certain age can recall without effort having to prepare our school papers on non-self-correcting typewriters, the kind Jesse Flores, the subject of this segment from the series A Different LA (ADLA), spent decades repairing. Flores died in 2011, and his son Ruben Flores inherited the business. Now in its 50th year, it's one of the oldest businesses in its neighborhood and one of the few remaining typewriter-repair shops in Highland Park, California.